"Penn Population Scientists Win NAM Catalyst Grant Award" - LDI News. 02/09/2021
A University of Pennsylvania team led by School of Arts & Sciences Assistant Research Professor and LDI Senior Fellow Iliana Kohler has won a National Academy of Medicine (NAM) Healthy Longevity Global Grand Challenge Catalyst Award supporting aging and health-related research in Malawi, Africa.
Entitled “Leveraging Social Networks and Linkage to Care to Foster Healthy Aging in a Low-Income Context,” the Kohler project is in keeping with the international scope of the NAM program. The proposed aging research work is an offshoot of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) run by Penn’s Population Studies Center (PSC) and Population Aging Research Center (PARC) for two decades.
“Our study population in Malawi broadly represents the living conditions of large numbers of individuals living in poor sub-Saharan countries, so the relevance of our work extends beyond Malawi,” explained Kohler, PhD, who is also Associate Director of the Penn Population Studies Center. “Aging has a very different dynamic in this context,” said Kohler. “Forty-years old in Malawi is not like 40-years old in the U.S. or Europe. We call it accelerated aging. In Malawi there are no retirement homes or long-term care institutions or anything like that. The village and the family are all there is.”